All Rise...

The Charge

Opening Statement

Barbet Schroeder's sophisticated and savvy Tricheurs is a story about
gambling, abusive relationships, and most importantly, cheating (which is what
the title means, in French). The cheating goes far beyond the simple cheating in
a casino, which is what the film is about—a tense hijink caper about a man
and a woman trying to pull off a roulette scam. These people cheat one another,
and cheat life, and cheat themselves out of a sense of happiness and
satisfaction.

Luckily, Tricheurs, with an excellent transfer, great sound, and a
modestly entertaining story, is a DVD that won't cheat you.

Facts of the Case

Superstitious gambler Elrich has been seduced by a lady who lives in the
casino. In fact, she is the casino. Everyone in the casino knows who he is, and
knows how he plays—almost suicidal. Elrich bets spectacularly, wins
spectacularly, and loses absolutely everything in equally spectacular
fashion.

After leaving the casino with a few coins in his pocket, he sees a lady
walking in a red dress with the number seven on it, which is his lucky number.
Her name is Suzie, and she is having an argument with a man. Elrich gallantly
escorts her away, and procures her services as a good luck charm in the
casino.

She becomes tangled within his web of addiction, and soon, they are head
over heels in casinos, winning, losing, and desperately trying to stay ahead of
the wheel. Unfortunately, the house always wins.

Elrich meets a man named Jorg, who is a professional cheat. Elrich himself
is not a dishonest man, but is soon taken in by Jorg as an accomplice. Soon,
Elrich is flying all over the world, pulling scams at casinos in exotic
locations, making fortunes. Jorg pulls one scam too many, and is arrested in
spectacular fashion.

Without Jorg, Elrich and Suzie decide to pull their own roulette scam, and
in short order, have more money than they could ever know what to do with. But
suddenly, Elrich is miserable—money, it would seem, was never what he was
after. Playing is what matters, and more precisely, losing is what matters.

The cheating, the conning, and the winning—these things are easy for
Elrich. The true challenge, the true gamble, will be avoiding his own nature,
and not resorting to being the spectacularly suicidal player he has always
been.

The Evidence

Tricheurs definitely feels like a spiritual predecessor to the recent
film Owing Mahoney, and indeed, the two films have much in common. They
both explore similar themes about desperately unhappy people who feel compelled
to self-destruct, because they are addicted to the sensation. The world makes no
sense to them when they win, but when they lose—then, they can finally be
alive.

These gamblers do not play to win. They play to lose, as spectacularly as
they can. For Elrich, victories are hollow. He explains to Suzie that life is so
much sweeter when you have lost everything—food tastes better, the sunset
is more vibrant, because you can truly appreciate it. When you win, everything
feels the same, and it is empty.

As they become successful pulling off their scams, Elrich becomes more and
more unhinged and unhappy, as his world begins to become indistinct. "I
have a feeling [things are] going to go sour," he says miserably, "It
happens everything when I win."

Tricheurs is a skillful film that manages to speak profoundly and
eloquently through its troubled characters, and a quite enjoyable one at that.
Schroeder comments, in his interview, that this is a film about losing, and
about losers—and therefore, is an amazingly hard film to sell. Any film
about gambling will, essentially, be about losers, and losing, and these are not
subjects that people want to see. Nobody wants to relate to a loser.

And losers, they are. Jorg is so obsessed with the idea of being the best
thief, the best gambler, and the absolute best, that he basically loses his grip
and starts running madly through the casinos, screaming incoherencies. Elrich
lives for the gamble, for the thrill of the casino, but when he wins, he is not
happy. If not money, then what is he playing for? We meet Suzie in tow behind an
abusive and violent man, from which Elrich springs her. Initially, she does not
like gambling, but a week spent with Elrich changes everything. Suddenly, she
cannot turn away from the gambling; and worse, Elrich is no better than the
previous man—he is just as violent, short-tempered, and abusive. Her
addiction, in a way, is even worse than Elrich's and Jorg's

The tragedy of these characters is palatable. These are battered individuals
whose lives intersect not out of personal interest, but out of necessity. They
need one another—clearly, at times, they do not even like one another. But
they fulfill a need, a purpose, and they all feed of one another. Their
addictions become justified. These are interesting demons, and they make for an
entertaining and riveting story, to say the least.

The main character, Elric (played by Jaques Dutronc, who I swear, is the
French version of Gary Oldman) plays the tortured, "happy when he is
winning, a violent bastard when he is losing" gambling addict quite well,
and most of the performances in this movie are quite well done. Occasionally,
the ham gets laid on a bit thick, especially during violent outbursts in the
casino, yelling inane things like "Casinos are the real thieves!"
while actually leaping from table to table, stealing chips.

This film, a joint release between HVE and Janus Films, is advertised under
the moniker of The Classic Collection. Being a Janus Films release and all,
these DVDs feels vaguely like they could have been a full-blown Criterion
release, if they had eaten their spinach.

This DVD certainly has a distinct Criterion-esque vibe about it. The
transfer and audio are quite top-notch and on par with such, but
Tricheurs lacks the extras, the authority, the spine number, and of
course, the bragging rights of a proper Criterion disc.

Oh, yes. One other thing Tricheurs lacks from its Criterion brethren
is the stiff price tag. Can anyone say "bargain"?

I do like that HVE treated the subtitling in Tricheurs with
sophistication. Many movies have a problem with
"over-subtitling"—that is, every small social nicety and phrase
and drink order and barked command and simple greeting gets its own subtitle,
which is unnecessary, and a bit insulting to the viewer. Most of us can
understand much from a film simply by watching the nuances of the characters (if
he stands in the middle of the street and hollers at a yellow car that stops for
him, odds are, he said something to the effect of "Taxi!"). This
excessive subtitling can be cumbersome. Tricheurs has a great balance in
its subtitling. The words flow well without ever feeling overemphasized or
burdensome or excessive. Very few liberties are taken with the subtitling, and
the translation is very well written.

Video quality is quite superb. Grey levels can get washed out from time to
time, but overall, colors are very well represented, especially the reds and
greens. This makes the casino shots quite exceptional. The occasional large tear
and defect from the original source do spoil the image, but these are minimal,
and the transfer itself is clearly cleaned up and quite sparkling as a whole.
There are no problems with jagged edges, edge artifacts, or the like, and the
bitrate for the film stays between 8.5 and 9.5 Mbps the entire film.

The sound is also quite excellent. The buzzing of the crowds, the slap of
the chips hitting the felt tables, and most importantly, the spinning and
clamoring of the roulette wheel swirling and clinking is marvelously ambient and
vibrant, with each sound full and completely articulate. Despite being a simple
Dolby Digital 2.0 mix (in the native French), the mixing is marvelously full and
dynamic. The occasional crackles of the soundtrack occur, especially in the
first five minutes of the film, and clearly, the source material is slightly
damaged during these segments. The soundtrack, a smokey jazz number that feels
orchestrated by Alfred Hitchcock, is marvelously subtle and quite suitable for
the picture.

Though the packaging advertises a robust three extra features, the DVD, for
reasons unbeknownst to this humble reviewer, only includes a meager two
features. The original theatrical trailer is always a fun treat, though it
includes no subtitles, so be wary. Secondly, an interview with director Barbet
Schroeder is included, which is a short (eight and a half minutes) look into the
director's own personal musings and inspirations behind the film. In excellent
English, he explains how his own friend's gambling problems directly inspired
the creation of the central protagonist in the film.

This friend—who in an ironic twist of fate, appears in the film not as
a gambler, but as the casino manager—would sneak down to the casino, after
hours, and start playing with feverous intensity. Not only that, he would
actually start to cheat the very casino that the film was being shot in,
jeopardizing the entire production. Not a bad interview, but a bit short.

The third feature, an essay by gambling specialist and author Christopher
Pawlicki, is labeled on the packaging but nowhere to be found on the disc.
Therefore, it scores rather poorly in the final judgment.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

It is always interesting to watch a film that stands on the very threshold of
becoming incredibly dated, prior to its passing forever into antiquity. Now,
some films hold up exceptionally well with age, managing to stay fresh and
modern and relevant, despite the technology in the film falling hideously out of
date, the fashion falling into thrift stores across the country and purchased
decades later by your future children, and the set designs resembling something
out of either a Norman Rockwell painting or a porno film (hey, it depends on how
old a film we're talking here).

Looking for an example? One that springs immediately to mind is Francis Ford
Coppola's The Conversation—a
fantastic film, but incredibly embarrassing in a modern-day context. Man,
watching them crank up those tube amp receivers just gives me the screaming
heebie-jeebies. The technology in a film can become so dated sometimes that in a
modern context, it becomes more difficult to relate to directly. This can
adversely affects the pleasure in watching the film (though admittedly, the
older the film gets, the more it gains back in "kitsch"
factor—an external variable that I shan't address here.)

Filmed in 1983, Tricheurs has the distinct vibe of a film about to
graduate early into the class of the forgotten. While the clothes and the
locations are suitably ambiguous and unassuming to avoid ridicule in the coming
years and decades, the constructed reality of a casino in Tricheurs bears
such little resemblance to a modern-day casino as to be laughable. The notion
that such primitive technology could be effectively utilized to defraud a
modern-day casino, if you were to try and use it, would probably give the pit
bosses a nostalgic laugh, inspiring them to tell you a story about their father,
who, coincidentally, was also a pit boss, and the last guy who tried to pull a
stunt like that, and so on, and you would enjoy a nostalgic trip down memory
lane before you went straight to jail.

I mean, for Bob's sake, they have six black-and-white cameras on the casino
floor. A modern-day casino has more cameras in the third stall of the ladies
washroom alone.

In terms of chronological embarrassment, Tricheurs is not quite there
yet, by any means—but I fear for its future.

Closing Statement

A sharp release, Tricheurs crams excellent value into a modest price,
considering the excellent, Criterion-esque vibe of the disc. You feel like you
really get your money's worth. And while the film itself may not be worthy of
being a Criterion, it is still an enjoyable piece of cinema, and worth a look.
It has style, and class, and its nuances are subtle, but quite enjoyable. If
gambling films are to your liking, check out Tricheurs before you cash
your chips in.

The Verdict

Take a chance and spin the roulette wheel with Tricheurs—the
film is a subtle, entertaining and almost campy cinematic experience, though not
quite worthy of being a classic. Still, it is most excellent; the film is
skillfully directed, the DVD presentation is a sharp one, and overall,
Tricheurs is worth your consideration.